In the closing days of the recently concluded November term, the Illinois Supreme Court allowed petitions for leave to appeal from three new civil cases. Our first-look previews of those cases begin today with People ex rel. Madigan v. Illinois Commerce Commission. Madigan is an interesting grant for the Court. On the face of the Appellate Court’s order, it would appear to be a relatively simple question of filing deadlines and appellate jurisdiction. Whether or not the Court will travel beyond those issues to the utility rate-making question below remains to be seen.
Madigan arises from a decision of the Illinois Commerce Commission, the administrative entity which supervises utilities in Illinois, to allow the respondent water company to impose a 1.25% reconciliation surcharge on its customers. The Commission also declined to require the utility to adopt a unit sewer rate for low-volume customers. The Attorney General attempted to appeal both aspects of the Commission’s decision.
And that is where the Attorney General ran into problems. Illinois Supreme Court Rule 335 provides that an appellant must file a petition for review from a final administrative decision within thirty days of an appealable final order in order to vest the Appellate Court with jurisdiction. The Public Utilities Act – 220 ILCS 5/10-201(a) — provides for a thirty-five day filing deadline for petitions for review, but the Fifth District Appellate Court struck down section 10-201 twenty-seven years ago in Consumers Gas Co. v. Illinois Commerce Commission.
The Commission issued its order in Madigan on July 31, 2012, and denied the Attorney General’s petition for rehearing on September 11, 2012. The Attorney General didn’t file a notice of appeal and petition for review until October 16, 2012 – thirty-five days after the order had become final and appealable. So the Appellate Court held that the petition was untimely and dismissed the appeal for lack of jurisdiction.
Before closing, the Appellate Court issued a stern warning for careless practitioners. Like most appellate rules, the Illinois Supreme Court Rules, which govern appellate practice throughout the state, require a number of different elements in an Opening Brief, including an explanation of the reviewing court’s jurisdiction. According to the Appellate Court in Madigan, none of the three parties before it had complied with that requirement: “the parties’ failure to identify or even address the threshold issue of jurisdiction has resulted in the unnecessary expenditure of a significant amount of judicial resources while resolving this case, which could have been easily avoided had the parties complied with the clear mandate of Rule 341(h)(4)(ii).”
We expect Madigan to be decided in the late spring or early fall of 2014.
